Performance tuning for BSM

The Business Service Management (BSM) product suite can dramatically simplify an organization’s IT environment by providing process automation and service management solutions. Though BMC benchmarking greatly improves the performance of BSM products before they are released, understanding how best to tune your environment is critical.

The following topics contain information on performance tuning for BSM:

This section addresses environments and configurations for typical BMC enterprise customers, with emphasis on the following tasks:

Evaluating the performance of a configuration running BSM applications

Identifying potential bottlenecks that might cause performance issues

Collecting and interpreting diagnostic data to identify the root cause of a performance issue

Product and configuration focus

Any BSM environment should contain the following for an ITIL-compliant product set:

Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

Automated discovery sources

Service Impact Management and Service Level Management tools

Incident, Problem, and Change Management

The recommendations in this section are based on tests conducted with products running on the BMC Remedy Action Request System server (such as BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite) and products such as BMC Service Impact Manager and BMC Configuration Discovery. However, the majority of the techniques discussed are generic recommendations that can be applied to any product set.

To reduce the scope of BSM performance tuning, these topics focus primarily on the Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases and the Tomcat servlet engine.

Performance considerations

Sizing a database server for capacity is important because it might not be possible to scale the database tier horizontally unless you are using Oracle RAC.

Database performance is highly dependent on a fast I/O subsystem.

Since the AR System server only caches metadata, it is highly dependent on the fast, reliable, low-latency connection to the database.

BMC recommends a gigabit connection with close to zero latency between the AR System server and the database. Any additional hop, packet screener, or firewall has a negative impact on performance.

For the AR System server tier, you can scale horizontally by configuring multiple AR System servers configured as a server group.

For the web tier, you can scale horizontally by configuring multiple mid tiers connecting to the same AR System server or server group, and by configuring a load balancer (or a reverse proxy) in front of the mid tiers to do the routing.

BMC recommends having a dedicated environment for the BSM application. Performance is difficult to manage when multiple applications are running in the same environment.

If there is a load balancer or firewall between the mid tier and the AR System server, configure so that idle connections from the mid tier are not severed. Reestablishing severed connections takes additional time.

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